SME profile: Building businesses in DNA of D-Town Enterprises founder

Rowdha Ali Mohammed Al Sakit's great-grandfather used to have his own dhow and would trade on the seas, while her grandfather is the founder of Al Abbar Group.

It is no surprise that Rowdha Al Sakit has become an entrepreneur. The Emirati founder and chief executive of the Dubai architectural and design services firm D-Town Enterprises comes from a long line of business figures. Her great-grandfather used to have his own dhow and would trade on the seas, while her grandfather is the founder of Al Abbar Group – the family-owned architectural cladding and facades company that has installed the interiors for many of the city’s landmark buildings.

“Dubai is about businesses,” says Ms Al Sakit. “Right now, when [people] look at Dubai, they say oil built Dubai. But if you look before the oil, what were the people in Dubai doing? They used to be traders. So I think it’s something in the DNA.”

Ms Al Sakit, 26, spent about a year working in the family business and a similar amount for another company, but says she has had ideas and concepts for running her own business from a young age.

“I started creating businesses even before attending school. I created them in my mind, on my laptop. I always had concepts, and I studied them through my university years,” she says.

She has a bachelor’s degree in architecture and interior design from Zayed University and a second degree from the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti Milano.

“My family used to spend their summers in Milan every year,” says Ms Al Sakit. “I’m not the type that loves to have a very long vacation doing nothing, so I used that to enter their classes and schools and I really loved it.”

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It was a concept created as part of her architecture course at Zayed University in Dubai that led to her starting her business, D-Town Enterprises. She had drawn up a concept design for a floating hotel, which was displayed as part of an exhibition of students’ work.

“An investor came and said: ‘I like this – I want to do it’.”

D-Town was then launched in 2014, with Ms Al Sakit putting together a team and finding office space in Business Bay. Although the hotel project remains unbuilt, the company picked up other commissions to design eco-friendly villas.

One of these, a 10,000 square metre property on a 20,000 square metre plot in Al Khawaneej, which had to be built in three phases, incorporated solar panels to provide some of its power and was designed with a central water feature in the house that actually treated wastewater, allowing it to be reused for irrigation. Other commissions have included a range of commercial and residential projects for private clients.

D-Town Enterprises now employs 12 staff and offers services from architectural and interior design to project management, branding consultancy and a store that offers its own ceramics and tableware designs for existing clients.

The company is now embarking on its biggest venture to date – a huge materials library that is expected to cost about Dh24 million to build.

The D-Town Library was announced last month and is proposed to be the world’s biggest materials library. Ms Al Sakit did not disclose the location of the site, but said it would be a 50,000 square metre building and would open at the end of this year. She said that when planning some of its own projects, D-Town Enterprises had to search extensively for materials.

“If we, as a design office, are creating a hospitality project, and we need to gather the right resources for that project. It will take us one month to just gather the right information, the right pricing and ship it from all over the world,” she said.

Work is under way on selecting the materials that will be featured in the library, as well as the people who will run it.

“We don’t have salespeople, or people with random backgrounds. They’re either material engineers, architects or designers – that’s it. Why? Because they will help you find what you want and will have a knowledge of all of the materials that will be showcased.”

Ms Al Sakit said the creation of the library was in tune with the vision of UAE Vice President and Ruler of Dubai Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid to make Dubai a knowledge capital, and that it has been supported by his daughter, Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed, who is the vice chairwoman of the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority.

“It will put Dubai on the map for the largest materials library in the world. It’s going to be a destination,” Ms Al Sakit said, pointing out that many of Dubai’s existing design consultancies service projects not just in the Middle East but across much of Africa and South Asia.

“After we’ve run the one in Dubai, we’re going to be taking the concept internationally. We’ll be taking it to the design capitals of the world,” she said.

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